Proceedings

The second step was to establish the information associated with the articles that were
extracted from the databases:
• Author(s);
• Title;
• Journal Name;
• Language: not all the articles were in English, but we preferred to keep a track
on all XBRL related articles, even if we didn’t review the ones in another
foreign language;
• Type of research: Economic, Computer Science and Others. Given the fact
that two of the analyzed articles couldn’t be included in none of the first two
categories, as we initially developed them, we created a new category, called
“Other”. The two articles included here discuss about critical research
literature review in accounting and accounting education.
This information was stored in Excel in order to facilitate a further detailed analysis.
Also, we stored in Word a brief description of the most important points of the paper,
in order to facilitate the comparisons between different articles. This type of
information included: the subject, the procedure, the motivation, the target group, the
results and our subjective point of view regarding the paper. To facilitate the data
storage, search and data examination, we allocated in Excel a number for each paper
(example 148), that was also given to the articles (example 148_a) and to our
comments (example 148_c).
The third step was to analyze the articles keeping in mind some questions that we
considered to be important for our research: What themes emerge and what
conclusions can be drawn? What are the major similarities and differences between
the various writers? Are there any significant questions which emerge and which
could form a basis for further investigation? The answer to all this questions and the
link between the articles were included in the discussion and result section.
3. DISCUSSION AND RESULTS
During 13 years of XBRL existence, 78 articles related to this subject were published
in ScienceDirect and Springerlink databases (Table 1). The first two articles were both
published in the same volume: one was concluding that both XML and XBRL would
improve financial disclosure (Debreceny and Gray, 2001) and the other one was
discussing the problematic of XBRL in the context of continuous auditing (Woodroof
and Searcy, 2001). For early period adoption, there were other articles that focused on
the use of XML in financial reporting, the majority of them also emphasizing the
widespread adoption of Internet for financial reporting usage (Debreceny et al., 2002;
Dull et al., 2003; Beattie and Pratt, 2003; Vasarhelyi and Greenstein, 2003).
As it can be seen in Figure 1, ScienceDirect database journals shown a high interest
for articles related to XBRL topic. During 1998 – 2010, there were 62 articles
published in 25 journals included in ScienceDirect database. On the other hand, the
Springerlink database search lead to 16 articles, included in 3 Journals, all related to
the computer science filed.
~ 723 ~